Tag Archives: rhubarb

I’m falling asleep as I type this. I’m looking at words appear on the screen and feeling fingers tapping but not quite understanding the force that moves them. At the end of the day, my fingers are bloated so they fall with more weight than normal on the keys. I’m blasting wordless electronic music; it’s raucous enough to keep me from taking a nosedive into the keyboard but it doesn’t distract me.Continue reading →

Feeling completely myself, I am not. But I’m working hard to fix that (overdoing it, probably), and I’ve unearthed a little bit of the old me. I’ve missed it.

You may have noticed that I’ve been absent from this space. Or maybe you haven’t. I mean, I’m not Smitten Kitchen here. But I had checked out. I haven’t read your blogs either.

It bothers me when blog authors (well, the ones who don’t make money from their blogs) apologize for being absent. It bothers me not because I find it arrogant, but because no one should have to apologize for something that’s not his/her job. I guess I’m good at looking after others’ mental health; my own is a different story. So I’m not apologizing, but I’m being honest about the absence because, yeah, I’ve not been feeling well; yeah, I’ve been dealing with “stuff”; yeah, I’ve been a little stressed. But, really, most weekends went by without me developing and testing new recipes and documenting it, because I just didn’t feel like it. I don’t ever want to come to this space if I’m not feeling it.

I had no intention of posting this recipe here—one that I quite literally just threw together little-by-little over the course of a couple of evenings (I am so not a weekday baker), hoping that it would work for a breakfast potluck we were having at work. I baked them off the morning of and piled the surprisingly substantial tarts, which were not even done cooling, in a Tupperware container that I left uncovered so they wouldn’t steam and turn from crisp to mushy. I ran to work in half the time it usually takes me, darting through the streets of my town with an open box of warm pastries. It couldn’t have looked as strange as that time I stuffed the remnants of a certain 3-layer cream cake into a bright blue cold-keeper bag and ran it around town in 90-degree weather. But it was still ridiculous. When I arrived, I threw spoonfuls of glaze messily onto just cooled-tarts and set them down.

These are simple tarts, elevated perhaps because they’re encased in my very favorite pastry, whose nuttiness is a warm counterpoint to the clarifying tang of the simple rhubarb filling. But they were very well-loved (in fact there are still shards of their flaky, flaky layers gracing corners of our office), so I thought I’d share them with you, just in case you haven’t had your fill of the stalks yet (or they’re the only thing in your garden). And I’ll take any excuse to get more rhubarb on the blog. I just lovethestuff.

Deconstruct. I find the action behind that word quite frightening. It’s hard. Construct. Construct is better. Building is much easier. There’s a start and an end goal. But evaluating, breaking things into pieces, and adapting as a result—well that’s just so much more difficult. Important but arduous.

I vividly remember my least favorite task in elementary school—second and third grade to be exact. Storyboards. Instead of writing a report, analyzing at the beat of our own young-minded understanding, we had to break up a story into parts. Concrete parts. I am now an ardent maker and follower of rules. But to me then, nothing was concrete. We were required to fit a story into distinct categories and subcategories, from “exposition” to “climax” to “dénouement.” The “scenes” that represented these categories were drawn carefully in Crayola colored pencil within clear lines and boxes. Rigid. One scene could not mean or be or act as two things. We had to identify a protagonist and antagonist. Well, that just wasn’t me. I wanted the protagonist to be the character who was compelling to me. And this character was often not the technical protagonist. And in third grade, what if I desperately wanted the story to be my story and what if when character X walks to Y wearing Z, it was me who I envisioned in her place? I’ve changed. I am more practical. I do see aspects of life in concrete terms now. But deconstruction can still be a struggle.

No. 9 Park, Boston, MA. Why go to that Barbara Lynch restaurant when you (and by you, I don’t mean me—unless I start a collection fund) can experience the tasting menu at newer, more daring Menton? But I assure you this old special-occasion standby is still turning out perfectly executed plates. Although the food is inspired by classics, each dish is still inventive—its fresh flavors shocking in their clarity. Each bite somehow manages to be simultaneously delicate and packed with flavor.

One of my favorite recipes on this blog is last year’s Honey-Cardamom Panna Cotta with Roasted Rhubarb. The tangy, fragrant yogurt panna cotta is a beautiful bed for tart, almost floral roasted rhubarb, a condiment I make and use until those long, ruby-pink stalks disappear.

Great minds think alike, methinks. OK, I know, I know. I should never utter my name in the same sentence as No. 9 Park’s Pastry Chef, who was nominated in 2012 for Food and Wine’s “Best New Pastry Chef.” So I guess the real point is simply that yogurt panna cotta and rhubarb taste damn good together. Jamie’s version:

I don’t think I’ve been bored since around 1996. Physically bored, that is. I don’t understand the idea of having nothing with which to fill time. Jaded, I get. Monotony, sure. Ennui, mais oui. I may not always enjoy or find meaning in what I’m doing. But, on the off chance that my to-do list is completely stained with the harsh boldness of my pen’s horizontal slashes, I can always find something to keep my mind turning. I guess this is a curse for many — the unfortunate result of a hyper-connected age. For me, it’s a lifeline. It’s not that I don’t appreciate calm or silence. I do! Man, do I ever, sometimes. But I’ve always been afraid of extended periods of nothingness, of white noise.